how could the end be happy
by TolkienGirl
Summary: Maybe Captain America should have gone under cryo between missions. That way he wouldn't have had to memorize the ways the world had changed all around him while he stayed painfully still. He was frozen in the past; he might as well be frozen in the present. But Captain America is, to some minds, no more. (Steve angst, post-Civil War. Set in Wakanda. No slash.)


_It's like in the great stories Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened_? - Samwise Gamgee, _The Two Towers_

Steve remembers striking ice.

He tells no one this; he doesn't want the questions, and the answers would offer no crucial information. There is nothing of national importance about fear, about the way blackness clouded his eyes underwater, about the cold like iron that closed over him inexorably and never fast enough.

He had thought he was dying.

...

He wonders what Bucky remembers. Wonders how Bucky lost the arm, wonders how long Bucky got to be Bucky before they took that away from him.

He doesn't ask. Bucky goes back under cryo and his eyes close looking at Steve.

They had a few minutes, before. They cracked a few jokes, weak and thin.

They don't say, _you're my best friend_ , or _I will miss you_ , though they both mean it.

Steve watches the frost climb the glass, the touch of not-quite-death, and thinks that it wouldn't have done any good.

(Maybe Captain America should have gone under cryo between missions. That way he wouldn't have had to memorize the ways the world had changed all around him while he stayed painfully still.

He was frozen in the past; he might as well be frozen in the present.

But Captain America is, to some minds, no more.)

...

Steve wishes he could love Wakanda better. When he was a kid, he used to cart _National Geographic_ 's home from the library, pore over the pages, tell his mom where he'd go when he was older.

When Steve was ten, a doctor said he wouldn't live to see eighteen.

He remembers his mother's hand around his, tight, walking home in angry strides.

It wore her out—everything wore her out, but that never stopped her from loving him.

She didn't live to see forty.

Steve doesn't see thirty or beyond, but he lives.

...

Steve wanders the jungle. Sometimes Sam or Natasha comes with him. Sometimes he goes alone.

He finds a plateau that overlooks the falls, and sits with his legs hanging in the abyss.

Maybe he'd die if he fell. Maybe he wouldn't.

The world thinks Captain America is too indestructible to be human. It's really the other way around.

If tears slip, sometimes, there's nobody to see them. It's better that way—no doubt someone would want to bottle those tears, study the chemical composition of a superhero's grief.

It's very simple, Steve thinks. It's just the same as everyone else's.

...

"Heard you having a nightmare last night," Natasha says in her usual flat, suggestive tones. She is always blunter with him than anyone else is; in some ways it is kinder. He'll take a blunt instrument over drowning in the silence and stares all around him.

He'll take anything over drowning.

"We've had a long few months," he says.

"More like a long few years," Natasha says, quirking an eyebrow.

"Long few decades, if you want to get technical." They're standing in T'Challa's kitchen, which looks like a palace in itself, modern and clean. It's probably an acre long, Steve thinks.

He doesn't tell her that he always dreams about water in his lungs, always dreams about Peggy, always dreams about Bucky. All the fragments of his old life turned stiff and cold while he sinks and sinks.

She doesn't ask. She sits on the marble countertop, drinks the rest of Sam's orange juice—doesn't matter, there's gallons more—and then swings down.

"I have nightmares, too, Steve," she says, almost under her breath, and squeezes his arm in a rare display of affection as she heads in the direction of the tactical training rooms.

...

Steve's father died of tuberculosis. His mother's diabetes had complications that no one understood, back in those days. He might have died himself, with his laundry list of ailments.

He was born early, small and scrawny from the beginning.

The doctors told Sarah Rogers he didn't have a chance.

"But you fought through," she used to tell him, brushing his hair off his forehead. Scarlet fever, asthma attacks. The days when his stomach wouldn't keep anything down. "You always fight through."

Captain America can never get sick. Captain America can never get drunk.

He fights, but Steve no longer thinks he can fight _through_.

...

There's a lot of time to think in the long stretches of quiet here. Time to watch Bucky stay suspended in eternal stillness; time to miss the shield and miss Tony more.

Time to think of the old saying, _only the good die young._

Bucky Barnes died young; maybe Steve Rogers did too.

The worst of it is, they both went on ice, but Bucky was kept in the cold much longer. Steve lived a tragedy; Bucky became one.

Steve thought he was dying when he fell.

 _Only the good die young_. Steve doesn't know what that says about the ones who keep living.


End file.
